Firefighter apprentices head to Nepal

The group has raised £30,000 to enable them to fund the building of a facility to education younger children in a remote village in Nepal.

Working with the charity Classrooms in the Clouds each apprentice was set a personal target of raising £2,700. This formed part of their development programme as Firefighter and Community Safety Apprentices with Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS).

All money raised by the team has gone towards the building of the much needed Early Years Centre in Kharikhola, a remote Nepalese village near Lukla. The build will be to an earthquake resistant standard and will provide gender specific toilets as well as specialist early years learning resources.

This facility will provide strong foundations for learning, enabling the youngest children in the village access to an education.

Following the Nepalese earthquakes in 2015 which killed over 8,000 people, injured more than 21,000 people and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the need for this help is even more important and will give children for generations to come the opportunity of an education.

The apprentices will be out in Nepal for 16 days and will be accompanied by Dawa Geljen Sherpa who is a trustee of Classroom in the Clouds and his team of Sherpas. Dawa will lead the group on a trek for two and a half days to get to the village and once there the team will undertake various tasks to get the classrooms ready for the children. The party will sleep in tea houses and experience rural life in Nepal.

Sam Rogers, Apprentice Coordinator for CFRS will be accompanying the team. He said: “The apprentices have worked really hard raising this money and have been involved in some great fundraising activities, some of which have taken them out of their comfort zone, such as skydiving and some which have been completed through pure determination like the Everest ladder climb.

“Thanks to their hard work and support the facility that’s been built with the money will make a huge difference to the whole community of Kharikhola. We are all now looking forward to seeing the building and meeting the children and elders of the village.”

The apprentices will be accompanied by three members of CFRS staff who will accompany the group while they are in Nepal.  Once reaching the village they will need to finish off the rooms ready for students to use and hand the project over to the village at a celebration ceremony.